Google Ads and SEO

There is a symbiotic relationship between running an effective Google ads campaign and your SEO strategy. In order to reduce the cost per click in your ads it is essential you have optimised your content with SEO. What this means for your business is a reduced ad campaign spend or the ability to target more traffic with additional ads. Running ads will likely have an impact on your SEO as it has been discovered as a factor that will boost your organic rankings.

How much should you budget for ads?

Through a combination of high quality SEO and running ads on my own websites, I have found an increase in traffic from just a dollar a day, however this does not necessarily correlate to other businesses or increased conversions as it largely depends on the cost per click for certain search terms that draws converting traffic. When running ads for a business, you will need to pay for someone to manage your ads.The most common budget for people looking to start running ads, begins at $1,000 through to $10,000 dollars a month for larger businesses. To reduce the cost per click in your ads it is essential you have optimised your content with SEO. What this means for your business is a reduced ad campaign spend or the ability to target more traffic with additional ads. Running ads will also likely have an impact on your SEO as it has been discovered to boost your organic rankings.

How does cost per click work?

The cost per click is an indication of the cost you will be paying for a user to click on a particular ad, this is specifically related to the search term that user has entered in the search engine to find your ad placement. Different search terms will have a different cost per click value so an ad which has multiple search phrases being targeted will have a varying cost per click throughout the campaign.

When creating an ad, you are essentially bidding on different search terms, which have multiple factors that will impact the duration in which your ad is visible and it’s placement among other ads. This is why it’s important to target multiple keywords with a larger budget as well as running multiple ads so you can compare the effectiveness of different ads against certain keywords as well as the performance different ads have against each other. This is where A/B testing (split testing) comes into play.

What is split testing?

Split testing is the process in which you are comparing different elements to each other. This is not only related to Google ads, but can also be used to your SEO strategies as well as on-page conversions by comparing two different call-to-actions. The goal of split testing is to reduce the cost in Google ads as well as improving the user’s experience on your website. There are different ways to split test various elements, however it is most important to perform split testing on your ads to make sure you are targeting high quality traffic that is likely to convert and to make sure you are running the highest performing ads and constantly improving them.

The 3 main targets for split testing is to either increase the clicks to your website, form completions on your website or to increase purchases. However with all the recent updates to search engines particularly related to the BERT Google updates, split testing can also be used in SEO on entire landing pages, by comparing two sets of content to increase organic results. This is why it is important to retain two copies when you are running split tests.

Should you focus on Google Ads or SEO?

Google ads will deliver faster results as you’re paying for clicks, however once your budget has been spent you will not be targeting more users. SEO is used to increase organic traffic with a long-term impact, but will require more time to get these results. This is why you might find you are spending the same amount on a monthly budget for Google ads as you might for a high quality landing page that targets more users in the long run. Overall it is best to find a balance between your ads budget as well as the amount you are spending for someone to optimise your website for search engines.

Search Engine Specialist

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